Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

Monday, May 07, 2012

From Westword Thank you!!!
After nearly five days of testimony in a lawsuit brought by Troy
Anderson, a prisoner who's been in solitary confinement for twelve
years, a Denver federal judge was strongly urging Colorado Department of
Corrections officials to fix the harshest conditions at the state's
supermax prison -- before he has to do it for them. "It shouldn't take a
federal judge to write an opinion and embarrass the department in the
public eye to get this accomplished," U.S. District Brooke Jackson said.
Jackson's remarks, suggesting that there might have to be some
drastic changes in the way the Colorado State Penitentiary operates,
came midway through testimony in the case brought by Anderson, a state
inmate serving what amounts to a life sentence for charges from two
shootouts with police in the late 1990s. Anderson, who's been diagnosed
with mental illnesses ranging from ADHD to "intermittent explosive
disorder," has been confined at CSP since 2000 -- deprived of direct
sunlight or outdoor recreation, books (he's allowed two a year), and, he
claims, the medications that might actually help him control his
behavior, reduce his sentence and get him placed back int the general
prison population.
His lawsuit,
filed with the aid of student lawyers from the University of Denver's
Sturm College of Law, contends that the state prison policies that keep
him locked down 23 hours a day and and denied mental health treatment
are unconstitutional.
Nicknamed "Evil," Anderson has a long history of erratic behavior,
suicide attempts and violence going back to an early age, a voluminous
psychiatric record explored in my 2006 feature "Head Games."
He's one of ten state inmates who have been kept at the supermax for
more than a decade. Prison officials maintain that's because he poses a
threat to himself and other inmates as well as staff.
On Friday, former CSP warden Susan Jones, who reviewed Anderson's
placement last year, testified that "he told me he can't control his
anger. He was real clear that he had a lawsuit filed and that unless he
was properly medicated, he shouldn't be moved.... I was really concerned
about his ability to go out of CSP and hurt somebody."
But Anderson's attorneys contend that the supermax fails to provide
adequate treatment for mentally ill inmates -- who, deprived of
medication, exercise and socialization, deteriorate in solitary
confinement. Inmates can also receive negative write-ups, or "chrons,"
from guards that help keep them in segregation, even though they have no
opportunity to contest the information. Under direct questioning from
Jackson, Jones conceded that the situation needed some "fixing."
Jackson also heard testimony, delivered remotely by video, from other
supermax prisoners. David Bueno complained of unhealthy conditions in
the closet-like exercise room, equipped with a pull-up bar, that
substitutes for outdoor recreation; he described the effort of turning
his body around, trying to get "fresh air" from a grate that allows air
from outside the prison to enter the exercise room, as similar to that
of a chicken turning on a spit.
Inmate Carlos Mondragon said the last time he'd breathed real fresh
air was in 2004, when a transport team briefly let him enjoy the snow
outside CSP. "It felt real good [to play in the snow]," Mondragon
testified, "even though I was all chained up and the escort officers
were laughing at me." He's since had frequent suicidal thoughts, he
added: "I go to bed crying sometimes because I feel I have no hope of
being outside of that cell any more."
Former CSP warden Jones disputed Bueno's claims about "filthy" floors
at CSP. Jackson lamented that he couldn't conduct a surprise inspection
of the prison himself.
Breaking into an unusual colloquy with Jones when she was on the
stand, Jackson said he was troubled by the lack of meaningful
administrative review and the absence of due process in the use of
negative "chrons" to keep inmates in solitary for years. "It doesn't
seem fair to me," he declared. And some of the other conditions
described by inmates, if true, were clearly "inhumane" in his view.
"I understand the difficulties of running a prison," the judge said.
"Some of your customers at CSP, I put them there. How do we get this
fixed?"
The trial is expected to conclude early next week. Jackson's ruling
on the constitutional issues raised by Anderson isn't anticipated for
several weeks.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

The fact is that a majority of the CSP prisoners are on mind altering drugs such as wellbutrin. The reason the prison is not clean is because the guards could care less about the conditions and they are the only ones allowed to clean it. It is too dangerous and every prisoner is escorted within the prison by two guards and handcuffed and leg chained. Such ad seg units are in each prison, such as the old death row at CTCF. Actually the old Denver jail has worse conditions, according to prisoners I have talked with, than DOC.